jealousy—are more or less deep and enduring. In this class also there are fine characters, especially (as in the unimpassioned) when the mental gifts are high and the training refined. In this class too are found perhaps the worst characters which degrade the human race. In all save the rarest characters, the customary tranquillity may be broken by sullen cloud or actual storm. In the less capable and less elevated, devotion may become fanaticism, and tenacity may become blind prejudice, or sheer obstinacy. In this temperament too, in its lower grades, we meet too often—not all together perhaps, certainly not all in equal degree—with indolence, sensuality, inconstancy; or morbid brooding, implacability, and even cruelty.

I contend then that certain features of character, it may be in very varying degrees of intensity, belong to the more active and passionless temperament, and certain other features attend on the more reflective and impassioned temperament. If it can be shown that there are two marked groups of elements in character—the more impassioned group and the less impassioned group—and that each group may be inferred to exist if but one or two of its characteristic elements are clearly seen, why even then much would be gained in the interpretation of history and of daily life. But I contend for much more than this; the two temperaments have each their characteristic bodily signs; the more marked the temperament, the more striking and the more easily read are the bodily signs. In the intermediate temperament—a frequent and perhaps the happiest temperament—the bodily signs are also intermediate. The bodily characteristics run in groups also, as well as the mental. The nervous system of each temperament is enclosed in its own special organisation and framework. In my work on “character as seen in body and parentage,” I treat this topic with some fulness, and what is stated there need not be repeated now. It may be noted, however, that in the two temperaments there are peculiarities of the skin—clearness or pigmentation; of the hair—feebleness or sparseness, or closeness and vigour of growth; of the configuration of the skeleton and consequent pose of the figure.

If the conclusions here put forward are true, they give a key which opens up much character to us. They touch, as I have already said, a great range of character in every individual, but they make no pretension to be a system. They have only an indirect bearing on many phases of character; for in both the active and reflective temperaments there may be found, for example, either wisdom or folly, courage or cowardice, refinement or coarseness.

It must always be remembered, too, that besides the more marked types of character, whether bodily or mental, there are numberless intervening gradations. When the temperaments, moreover, are distinctly marked, the ordinary concurrent elements may exist in very unequal degrees and be combined in very various ways. One or two qualities may perhaps absorb the sum-total of nerve force. In the passionless man or woman extreme activity may repress the tendency to disapprove; immense self-importance may impede action. In the impassioned individual, inordinate love or hate may enfeeble thought; deep and persistent thought may dwarf the affections.

As I have said elsewhere: ‘For the ordinary purposes of life, especially of domestic and social life, the intervening types of character (combining thought and action more equally, though probably each in somewhat less degree) produce perhaps the most useful and the happiest results. But the progress of the world at large is mainly due to the combined efforts of the more extreme types—the supremely reflective and impassioned and the supremely active and unimpassioned. Both are needed. If we had men of action only, we should march straight into chaos; if we had men of thought only, we should drift into night and sleep!’

HENRY’S FAMILY PROCLIVITIES.

NOTE III.

If there is any truth in the views put forward in the foregoing chapter, and if history has at all faithfully portrayed a character concerning which it has had, at any rate, much to say, it is clear that Henry must be placed in the less impassioned class of human beings. When I first called attention to the three sorts of character—and the three groups of characteristics—the active, practical, and more or less passionless on the one hand; the less active, reflective, and impassioned on the other; and, thirdly, the intermediate class, neither Henry nor his period was in my mind. But when, at a later time (and for purposes other than the special study of character), I came to review the Reformation with its ideas, its men, its incidents, I saw at once, to my surprise, that Henry’s life was a busy, active, conspicuous, passionless life. He might have sat for the portrait I had previously drawn. Markedly unimpassioned men tend to be fitful, petulant, censorious, self-important, self-willed, and eager for popularity—so tended Henry. The unimpassioned are frequently sincere, conscientious, pious, and conservative—Henry was all these. They often have, especially when capable and favourably encompassed, a high sense of duty and a strong desire to promote the well-being of those around them—these qualities were conspicuous in Henry’s character.

How much of inherited organisation, how much of circumstance, how much of self-effort go to the making of character is a problem the solution of which is yet seemingly far off. Mirabeau, with fine perception, declared that a boy’s education should begin, twenty years before he is born, with his mother. Unquestionably before a man is born the plan of his character is drawn, its foundations are laid, and its building is foreshadowed. Can he, later, close a door here or open a window there? Can he enlarge this chamber or contract that? He believes he can, and is the happier in the belief; but in actual life we do not find that it is given to one man to say, I will be active, I will be on the spot, I will direct here and rebuke there; nor to another man to say, I will give myself up to thought, to dreams, to seclusion. Henry never said, with unconscious impulse or with conscious words, “I will be this, or I will not be that.”

Henry VIII. took altogether after his mother’s side, and she, again, took after her father. Henry was, in fact, his grandfather Edward IV. over again. He had, however, a larger capacity than his mother’s father, and he lived in a better epoch. Edward, it was said in his time, was the handsomest and most accomplished man in Europe. Henry was spoken of in similar words by his compeers both at home and abroad. Both were large in frame, striking in contour, rose-pink in complexion—then, as now, the popular ideal of manly perfection—and both became exceedingly corpulent in their later years. Both were active, courteous, affable, accessible; both busy, conspicuous, vain, fond of pleasure, and given to display. Both were unquestionably brave; but they were also (both of them) fickle, capricious, suspicious, and more or less cruel. Both put self in the foremost place; but Edward’s selfishness drifted rather to self-indulgence, while Henry’s took the form of self-importance. Extreme self-importance is usually based on high capacity, and Edward’s capacity did not lift him out of the region of pomposity and frequent indiscretion.

Edward IV. was nevertheless an able man although less able than Henry. Like Henry he belonged to the unimpassioned class; he was without either deeply good or deeply evil passion, but probably he had somewhat stronger emotions than his grandson.